Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem - Chapter 1574 Sacrifice

Chapter 1574  Sacrifice

“Aye. Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

Ragnar crossed eight paces in a single stride.

The warhammer came down on the back of Quinlan’s skull with everything a millennium of war had put into those arms.

CLANG!

[Synchra] screamed.

The Anima-grade armor reacted before Quinlan’s mind registered the impact, her [Anima Ward] flaring to life across the back of his helmet in a desperate burst of crimson light.

But she had been running on fumes since the fight with Alexios began. Her crimson veins had dimmed to embers. She’d tanked the Warrior King’s devastating attacks to the best of her ability and tried to keep Quinlan alive while he was bleeding profusely.

The reserves she drew from to power [Anima Ward] were nearly dry.

She caught the first layer of the impact. Twenty-five percent of a blow that would have caved in a city gate.

The rest went through.

Quinlan’s skull cracked.

The wound was immediately fatal, and [Overlord’s Sacrifice], the Primordial Subjugator spell that allowed him to transmit lethal damage to a marked slave, activated the instant the killing threshold was crossed. The spell found its designated target, a tanker slave Quinlan had marked as his sacrifice.

The lethal blow transferred across the subjugation bond in its entirety.

The tanker’s skull caved in from the inside.

He was dead before his body hit the floor of the wagon, and [Overlord’s Sacrifice] burned itself out in a flash of light that nobody nearby understood. But because the spell only worked if the designated target could actually tank the hit, the full weight of the blow was immediately transferred back to Quinlan.

The truth was that this spell had been built for attrition, not tanking the dwarven king’s full-power ambush to an unguarded skull.

Quinlan should have died.

The spell had fired. The backup had failed. [Synchra]’s ward was spent. The fracture was still spreading through bone that no longer had any protection, and the force that remained was still enough to be fatal.

Then it split.

The mechanism that saved his life was…

Twenty meters behind him, Vex’s body jerked like she’d been struck by an invisible hammer. Blood exploded from her nose, her ears, and the corners of her eyes. Her legs buckled before the sound of her own scream reached her throat. She hit the ground face-first and didn’t move.

The curse she’d carved into her own channels did what she’d built it to do.

What Quinlan didn’t know, what she had never told him and never intended to tell him, was that the bridge between their vitality wasn’t just an open door he could choose to walk through.

As far as Quinlan was aware, the curse worked as such: when he desired, he could take her mana and vitality, transferring his burden onto her.

But it should’ve been an active decision he had to make, not a passive curse activation.

However…

One quiet night in their home, long after the others had fallen asleep, Vex lay pressed against Quinlan’s bare chest with her white hair spilled across his shoulder and her legs tangled through his. The room was dark. The only light came from her eyes – twin red pentagrams that glowed softly against the hollow of his neck where her face was buried, casting faint crimson lines across his skin.

He was asleep. Deep, steady breathing. One arm draped over her waist, heavy and warm, holding her against him the way he always did, and she could feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath her cheek and the slow pulse of his heartbeat against her ear.

Her fingers moved across his body, tracing the invisible lines of the curse she’d written into his channels, following the pathways she knew by heart because she’d carved them herself, and her crimson tattoos pulsed dim and rhythmic as she worked.

She found the architecture. The bridge between his resources and hers, the one he refused to use for anything except mana. The one he would never walk across if it meant she bled in his place.

Her red eyes burned brighter. Tears slid down her cheeks and onto his chest, warm and quiet, and her arms tightened around him.

‘I know you don’t want to see me hurt, my love… I know that’s why you won’t use it. You’d take every wound yourself if you could. You’d die before you let any of us bleed for you.’

Her fingers kept moving. Rewriting. Adding a trigger that hadn’t been there before, calibrated to the threshold of a lethal wound, woven so deep into the curse’s structure that he would never notice it was there.

‘But I’m a greedy woman who’d rather go against your will than live in a bleak world where only your memory remains…’

She pressed her lips to his chest and held them there.

“I’m sorry.”

The tattoos along her arms flared once and went dark. The modification was done. She buried her face deeper into the curve of his neck and hugged him so tight her arms shook, and she stayed like that until the trembling stopped and the tears dried against his skin.

He never woke up.

She never told him.

She’d added a trigger.

If he sustained a wound past a threshold she’d calibrated to lethal, the bridge would activate on its own whether he liked it or not.

However, Vex was already aware of how [Overlord’s Sacrifice] worked, and she knew her own limits. She was a curse-wielder, not a tank. If a tank couldn’t sustain a hit, neither could she.

That’s why she hadn’t written it as a full transfer: she knew that a curse that killed her in his place would just leave him alive and alone, and he’d be heartbroken and resent her decision for the rest of his life.

Vex would never want to hurt the love of her life.

So she chose the option she knew Quinlan would accept, even if begrudgingly.

A split, the villain and his self-proclaimed most devoted warrioress, bleeding together on the battlefield, sharing the burden of a fatal strike together.

Just like this, his killing blow became their killing blow, divided across two bodies, and neither body took enough to die but both took enough to be severely damaged.

Quinlan’s vision went white.